Devices and methods herein generally relate to reducing the amount of marking material used in printing, and more particularly to achieving such reductions using threshold arrays and a toner reduction mask.
Reducing the usage of toner in printers, especially in color printers, increases toner yield. Some systems for reducing toner usage decrease the halftone frequency (which decreases image quality), adjust the tone reproduction curve (TRC) (which decreases contrast and image quality), use neighborhood processing to decide which pixel are to be turned on/off (which increases processing complexity), optimize print engine and image output terminal (IOT) components for better toner yields, etc. Additionally, some methods affect only the darker regions of images, which can prevent toner savings from being as high as expected.
Such toner saver methods can have a significant effect on image quality, and present a tradeoff between image quality and toner savings. The goal of such systems is to identify methods that will give greater toner savings, without sacrificing quality image.